Invisible Lines

Essays Poems Nancy Gaffield Mark Goodwin

Rob Hindle Chris Jones Photographs

Emma Bolland Nikki Clayton Karl Hurst

The line of a walk is articulate in itself a kind of statementIn Praise of Walking Thomas A Clark A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do Wanderlust A History of Walking Rebecca Solnit

Invisible Lines is the third ndash and last ndash in a series of themed digital supplements published by Longbarrow Press In this selection of poems and essays Nancy Gaffield Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle and Chris Jones consider the relationship between movement and mapping and the extent to which our itineraries (whether grounded or imaginative) are informed by cartographical detail (place names topography) and subjective experience (happenstance uncertainty whim) The lines made by walking point forward (as in the northward trajectory of Gaffieldrsquos Meridian) sideways (the slow-stepping rail-balancing practised by Goodwin) and back (the histories uncovered by Hindle and Jones) and sometimes in all directions at once Brian Lewis Sheffield August 2020

Wall art St John the Evangelist Corby Glen Lincolnshire Photograph by Emma Bolland

2

Rob Hindle

This is a place in Attercliffe Sheffield ndash an intersection where the narrator of one of my poems in The Footing and the historical subjects he is tracking raise their eyes to the possibilities of the urban horizon Itrsquos a point on a map it is also a moment a place reached a pause in which the narratorrsquos present (which was mine sometime in 2010) collides

with the present of a gang of men in the spring of 1925 walking away from a crime ndash a fatal attack on an Attercliffe man for which two of them a few weeks later were to hang The title of my sequence is Flights and Traverses chosen because I wanted to indicate how the poems describe movement away from a point (the lsquoflightrsquo) and also the phenomenon of that movement (the lsquotraversersquo or crossing) But the sequence also has a subheading 5 Itineraries and it had an earlier working title A Cartography Both suggest the original motive I wanted to follow footsteps ndash but I was also interested in the imaginative possibilities of mapping and the itinerary lsquoItineraryrsquo has its roots in the Latin for lsquotravellingrsquo and is usually understood to mean either a plan or a record of a journey it can therefore refer to an experience anticipated or recollected There is also something of the professional it traditionally refers to a dayrsquos travel especially for the purpose of judging or preaching or lecturing In many senses it is a lsquosetting outrsquo

Cartography Flights and Traverses

From the corner you could go anywhere Leveson Street Warren Street under the arches of Norfolk Bridge over the riverhellip

3

When we consider the word lsquoitinerantrsquo however the intention is less about professing more about exchange We think of salesmen or peddlers tinkers wandererers tramps A story or song from the road for a fag or a sup There is something perhaps about a bargain or a contract This is implicit in the flights and traverses Irsquove chosen to map out A man pays his way out of his homeland at the toll house on Grindleford Bridge He accepts the deal and intrigued taken in I follow Here is a story a narrative a passage from something known to something unknown I have a memory of childhood a halt on a moorland track my dad lsquogetting the map outrsquo taking bearings making judgements We are at the moment between getting lost and finding a way forward ndash between the original itinerary and a new route made at that moment and not until then I find this moment entirely creative and settling and inspiring We might be on a track thousands of years deep but in passing along it we are itinerant we are at a point between the journey recorded and the journey anticipated And when we stop and take bearings and judge our

surroundings we acknowledge this I now stop with my family and lsquoget the map outrsquo Therersquos a milepost on the old turnpike road over Houndkirk Moor What you canrsquot see obviously is the other side ndash which due to the weather is a pitted surface entirely illegible

Where are you going Far as I can When will you get there Evening Where have you come from Over the moor Will you return Never

4

My ancestor Richard Marsden traversing the Moor and in sight neither of the valley he grew up in or of the town to which he was headed is at this point itinerant He must make a new map On midsummerrsquos day in 1842 an Attercliffe woman walked out of her house set herself behind the coffin of her son and started the slow walk through Sheffield to the General Cemetery The cortege passed 50 thousand people come to observe the procession of the Chartist Samuel Holberry broken by hard labour in Northallerton Gaol and dead at 27

When I set out on this journey the maps I consulted were relics the Blitz of 1940 and the go-getting 1960s had done for the medieval town Had I found a record of the route taken ndash most likely along Norfolk Street Union Street and South Street then up Cemetery Road ndash I would have felt compelled to follow it The Crucible Cafeacute Rouge the drills and hoardings on The Moor Fortunately I found

only the barest details a connection between two points and an understanding that the route must have crossed the river at Ladyrsquos Bridge where there had been a travellersrsquo chapel

Between a dry green wall and the brown clatter of water a milepost Tidʃwell ndash 10 Buxton ndash 17 WH JF On the north face just runes and weather

5

I had the opportunity then to make my own path to drift to become itinerant I could go off-grid turn corners into quiet slower route-ways peer through smashed windows I could stop and notice things growing ndash now in the middle of the city then at its edge the sounds of its industry still proximate to the rush of the Porter Brook

Over the Brook ndash now over the Ring Road ndash I should have climbed the hill to the old gate on Cemetery Road with its worm and leaf mould all ruin and renewal But honouring Holberry I wanted to make a way to the grander entrance on Cemetery Avenue to cross the Porter Brook once more formally this time paying my dues of passage

into the underworld from where I could look back take stock

a plate by the chancel where yoursquod drop a coin for safe journey the water light through the glass pattering the walls

They turn into Eyre Lane its workshops full of shades These were his neighbours they have stilled their wheels and files for him

In an alley near South Lane someone has planted flowers in drums and pails poppies daisies nasturtiums sweet peas pink and lilac against the black brick

6

There are other ways of map-making In 1932 my great-uncle Harold died in the South Yorkshire Asylum ndash later called the Middlewood Hospital and now a housing development which with its tidiness and discreet cameras aspires to gated status I never knew I had a great-uncle Harold He spent most of his life in institutions ndash his learning difficulties presumably too much for the wider world to handle ndash and died in this one aged 27 This was the first journey I took ndash a short harrowing walk from his parentsrsquo house off Hillsborough Corner to Middlewood It is the most personal section of Flights and Traverses not only because of Harold but because I recognise these terraced streets There is something inevitable too about the journey which though in terms of its topography is a gentle climb is emotionally and psychologically a descent I follow Harold towards his end beyond the tram terminus and I walk back ndash and down ndash through a bit of my own past

Now they can see where they came the line of people all the way back to the town Still they come

Now there is the click of a back door the chitter of a budgerigar Then you are hurrying from one of these houses hair brushed tangled feet booted your undone laces tripping behind you I follow

This was once my territory that hill with the GR post box at the bottom school at the top the park where I rushed along one day my mind gleeful and vicious running after me Middlewood childhood cant that thing in all our cellars I shouldnrsquot have dared I pay out my breaths like twine each step shortening

7

I expected ghosts at the Asylum in the bottle-green shade of the Cemetery by the milepost on Houndkirk Moor I got glimpses stilled vices through workshop windows arches upturned on the skin of the river the ghost of myself in the glass of Saville House Walking through an urban landscape particularly enables you to accrue perspective there is a traversing of time as well as space You lose yourself take note adjust your bearings set out again Cutting away from current thoroughfares you pass into other ways older narrower quieter You uncover or discover gennels doorways rat runs even when you are tracing itineraries which are irrevocable you are making new paths unfurling the twine of a narrative by which to mark your way back

The map shows where in December 1940 the bombs fell which was everywhere just about but even this catastrophe can be narrated The bombers came from a point in space departed for another the bombs fell thinly on the leafy places thickly on the old centre they fell crashing into the silence of the school s s

When I get off the bus on the Hathersage Road it is a winter afternoon the sun near to setting The shires range southwards hills woods fields North across the boundary stream the road begins its descent into Sheffield My long shadow stretching out in front of me First published on the Longbarrow Blog 12 January 2014

Stained glass exploding into Campo Lane corn from a slashed sack

Where I finish in Flights and Traverses is a picture of chaos

but spared the church its praying faithful its sinners

I start down

8

Ecgbert

People lust for this placeits arrangement of copses and small fields hills layering the light into the south

It is a no manrsquos land a glamourbetween the high emptinessand a ditch of water

Dore ndash an end and a beginningKing of Wessex and Merciacome to take oaths from York

A car pelts past me into Old EnglandEcgbertrsquos broad scīrs laid out like a cloth napped by the tread of his armiesrsquo blitzkrieg

The sun sets my shadow in the road north I start down into the cityits roofs pale along the tree-line

scīrs OE shires

Rob Hindle lsquoEcgbertrsquo is the first poem in Rob Hindlersquos sequence lsquoDore Moor to the Marples Hotelrsquo which closes Flights and Traverses five long poems and sequences by Hindle that appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013)

9

The Idea of Walsingham Chris Jones

Irsquove never been to Walsingham Irsquove got to within about six miles of the village an old white signpost with black lettering pointed the way If I ever journeyed that way I would probably end up disappointed For all its status as that most rare of things ndash a Catholic shrine a place of holy pilgrimage in England ndash my feeling is Irsquod find it wholly underwhelming ndash that shot at chintzy religiosity that sense of a miracle- ground somehow not quite believing in itself as special under those dull Norfolk skies I literally like the sound of lsquoWalsinghamrsquo ndash the name itself has a mythic quality to it a sense

of England of old an England that never really existed More pertinently I think Irsquom drawn to the idea of Walsingham as it is represented in the piece of literature that first drew my attention to its existence ndash Robert Lowellrsquos poem lsquoA Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketrsquo Alongside those rather far-off alien descriptions of whaling around Cape Cod Massachusetts Lowell ndash all of a sudden ndash goes on an imaginative pilgrimage to England lsquothe world shall come to Walsinghamrsquo I do have an interest in places that are name-checked in literature ndash in poems in particular though I donrsquot go on expeditions to find these locations out Better by far to come on East Coker by accident I certainly donrsquot think of Larkin every time I step on the platform at Sheffield station (lsquoDockery and Sonrsquo) though my head did turn once on a road out of Galway when I saw a sign for a village flagged up in Paul Muldoonrsquos lsquoThe Sonogramrsquo lsquoon the road to Spiddal a woman hitching a ridersquo For lsquoSpiddalrsquo Muldoon informs us read lsquohospitalrsquo (cf Spittle Hill in Sheffield Spitalfields in London) Some of my most vivid memories ndash in this regard ndash are of coming on Irish place names with a literary connection During a car ride from Belfast

10

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

The line of a walk is articulate in itself a kind of statementIn Praise of Walking Thomas A Clark A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do Wanderlust A History of Walking Rebecca Solnit

Invisible Lines is the third ndash and last ndash in a series of themed digital supplements published by Longbarrow Press In this selection of poems and essays Nancy Gaffield Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle and Chris Jones consider the relationship between movement and mapping and the extent to which our itineraries (whether grounded or imaginative) are informed by cartographical detail (place names topography) and subjective experience (happenstance uncertainty whim) The lines made by walking point forward (as in the northward trajectory of Gaffieldrsquos Meridian) sideways (the slow-stepping rail-balancing practised by Goodwin) and back (the histories uncovered by Hindle and Jones) and sometimes in all directions at once Brian Lewis Sheffield August 2020

Wall art St John the Evangelist Corby Glen Lincolnshire Photograph by Emma Bolland

2

Rob Hindle

This is a place in Attercliffe Sheffield ndash an intersection where the narrator of one of my poems in The Footing and the historical subjects he is tracking raise their eyes to the possibilities of the urban horizon Itrsquos a point on a map it is also a moment a place reached a pause in which the narratorrsquos present (which was mine sometime in 2010) collides

with the present of a gang of men in the spring of 1925 walking away from a crime ndash a fatal attack on an Attercliffe man for which two of them a few weeks later were to hang The title of my sequence is Flights and Traverses chosen because I wanted to indicate how the poems describe movement away from a point (the lsquoflightrsquo) and also the phenomenon of that movement (the lsquotraversersquo or crossing) But the sequence also has a subheading 5 Itineraries and it had an earlier working title A Cartography Both suggest the original motive I wanted to follow footsteps ndash but I was also interested in the imaginative possibilities of mapping and the itinerary lsquoItineraryrsquo has its roots in the Latin for lsquotravellingrsquo and is usually understood to mean either a plan or a record of a journey it can therefore refer to an experience anticipated or recollected There is also something of the professional it traditionally refers to a dayrsquos travel especially for the purpose of judging or preaching or lecturing In many senses it is a lsquosetting outrsquo

Cartography Flights and Traverses

From the corner you could go anywhere Leveson Street Warren Street under the arches of Norfolk Bridge over the riverhellip

3

When we consider the word lsquoitinerantrsquo however the intention is less about professing more about exchange We think of salesmen or peddlers tinkers wandererers tramps A story or song from the road for a fag or a sup There is something perhaps about a bargain or a contract This is implicit in the flights and traverses Irsquove chosen to map out A man pays his way out of his homeland at the toll house on Grindleford Bridge He accepts the deal and intrigued taken in I follow Here is a story a narrative a passage from something known to something unknown I have a memory of childhood a halt on a moorland track my dad lsquogetting the map outrsquo taking bearings making judgements We are at the moment between getting lost and finding a way forward ndash between the original itinerary and a new route made at that moment and not until then I find this moment entirely creative and settling and inspiring We might be on a track thousands of years deep but in passing along it we are itinerant we are at a point between the journey recorded and the journey anticipated And when we stop and take bearings and judge our

surroundings we acknowledge this I now stop with my family and lsquoget the map outrsquo Therersquos a milepost on the old turnpike road over Houndkirk Moor What you canrsquot see obviously is the other side ndash which due to the weather is a pitted surface entirely illegible

Where are you going Far as I can When will you get there Evening Where have you come from Over the moor Will you return Never

4

My ancestor Richard Marsden traversing the Moor and in sight neither of the valley he grew up in or of the town to which he was headed is at this point itinerant He must make a new map On midsummerrsquos day in 1842 an Attercliffe woman walked out of her house set herself behind the coffin of her son and started the slow walk through Sheffield to the General Cemetery The cortege passed 50 thousand people come to observe the procession of the Chartist Samuel Holberry broken by hard labour in Northallerton Gaol and dead at 27

When I set out on this journey the maps I consulted were relics the Blitz of 1940 and the go-getting 1960s had done for the medieval town Had I found a record of the route taken ndash most likely along Norfolk Street Union Street and South Street then up Cemetery Road ndash I would have felt compelled to follow it The Crucible Cafeacute Rouge the drills and hoardings on The Moor Fortunately I found

only the barest details a connection between two points and an understanding that the route must have crossed the river at Ladyrsquos Bridge where there had been a travellersrsquo chapel

Between a dry green wall and the brown clatter of water a milepost Tidʃwell ndash 10 Buxton ndash 17 WH JF On the north face just runes and weather

5

I had the opportunity then to make my own path to drift to become itinerant I could go off-grid turn corners into quiet slower route-ways peer through smashed windows I could stop and notice things growing ndash now in the middle of the city then at its edge the sounds of its industry still proximate to the rush of the Porter Brook

Over the Brook ndash now over the Ring Road ndash I should have climbed the hill to the old gate on Cemetery Road with its worm and leaf mould all ruin and renewal But honouring Holberry I wanted to make a way to the grander entrance on Cemetery Avenue to cross the Porter Brook once more formally this time paying my dues of passage

into the underworld from where I could look back take stock

a plate by the chancel where yoursquod drop a coin for safe journey the water light through the glass pattering the walls

They turn into Eyre Lane its workshops full of shades These were his neighbours they have stilled their wheels and files for him

In an alley near South Lane someone has planted flowers in drums and pails poppies daisies nasturtiums sweet peas pink and lilac against the black brick

6

There are other ways of map-making In 1932 my great-uncle Harold died in the South Yorkshire Asylum ndash later called the Middlewood Hospital and now a housing development which with its tidiness and discreet cameras aspires to gated status I never knew I had a great-uncle Harold He spent most of his life in institutions ndash his learning difficulties presumably too much for the wider world to handle ndash and died in this one aged 27 This was the first journey I took ndash a short harrowing walk from his parentsrsquo house off Hillsborough Corner to Middlewood It is the most personal section of Flights and Traverses not only because of Harold but because I recognise these terraced streets There is something inevitable too about the journey which though in terms of its topography is a gentle climb is emotionally and psychologically a descent I follow Harold towards his end beyond the tram terminus and I walk back ndash and down ndash through a bit of my own past

Now they can see where they came the line of people all the way back to the town Still they come

Now there is the click of a back door the chitter of a budgerigar Then you are hurrying from one of these houses hair brushed tangled feet booted your undone laces tripping behind you I follow

This was once my territory that hill with the GR post box at the bottom school at the top the park where I rushed along one day my mind gleeful and vicious running after me Middlewood childhood cant that thing in all our cellars I shouldnrsquot have dared I pay out my breaths like twine each step shortening

7

I expected ghosts at the Asylum in the bottle-green shade of the Cemetery by the milepost on Houndkirk Moor I got glimpses stilled vices through workshop windows arches upturned on the skin of the river the ghost of myself in the glass of Saville House Walking through an urban landscape particularly enables you to accrue perspective there is a traversing of time as well as space You lose yourself take note adjust your bearings set out again Cutting away from current thoroughfares you pass into other ways older narrower quieter You uncover or discover gennels doorways rat runs even when you are tracing itineraries which are irrevocable you are making new paths unfurling the twine of a narrative by which to mark your way back

The map shows where in December 1940 the bombs fell which was everywhere just about but even this catastrophe can be narrated The bombers came from a point in space departed for another the bombs fell thinly on the leafy places thickly on the old centre they fell crashing into the silence of the school s s

When I get off the bus on the Hathersage Road it is a winter afternoon the sun near to setting The shires range southwards hills woods fields North across the boundary stream the road begins its descent into Sheffield My long shadow stretching out in front of me First published on the Longbarrow Blog 12 January 2014

Stained glass exploding into Campo Lane corn from a slashed sack

Where I finish in Flights and Traverses is a picture of chaos

but spared the church its praying faithful its sinners

I start down

8

Ecgbert

People lust for this placeits arrangement of copses and small fields hills layering the light into the south

It is a no manrsquos land a glamourbetween the high emptinessand a ditch of water

Dore ndash an end and a beginningKing of Wessex and Merciacome to take oaths from York

A car pelts past me into Old EnglandEcgbertrsquos broad scīrs laid out like a cloth napped by the tread of his armiesrsquo blitzkrieg

The sun sets my shadow in the road north I start down into the cityits roofs pale along the tree-line

scīrs OE shires

Rob Hindle lsquoEcgbertrsquo is the first poem in Rob Hindlersquos sequence lsquoDore Moor to the Marples Hotelrsquo which closes Flights and Traverses five long poems and sequences by Hindle that appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013)

9

The Idea of Walsingham Chris Jones

Irsquove never been to Walsingham Irsquove got to within about six miles of the village an old white signpost with black lettering pointed the way If I ever journeyed that way I would probably end up disappointed For all its status as that most rare of things ndash a Catholic shrine a place of holy pilgrimage in England ndash my feeling is Irsquod find it wholly underwhelming ndash that shot at chintzy religiosity that sense of a miracle- ground somehow not quite believing in itself as special under those dull Norfolk skies I literally like the sound of lsquoWalsinghamrsquo ndash the name itself has a mythic quality to it a sense

of England of old an England that never really existed More pertinently I think Irsquom drawn to the idea of Walsingham as it is represented in the piece of literature that first drew my attention to its existence ndash Robert Lowellrsquos poem lsquoA Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketrsquo Alongside those rather far-off alien descriptions of whaling around Cape Cod Massachusetts Lowell ndash all of a sudden ndash goes on an imaginative pilgrimage to England lsquothe world shall come to Walsinghamrsquo I do have an interest in places that are name-checked in literature ndash in poems in particular though I donrsquot go on expeditions to find these locations out Better by far to come on East Coker by accident I certainly donrsquot think of Larkin every time I step on the platform at Sheffield station (lsquoDockery and Sonrsquo) though my head did turn once on a road out of Galway when I saw a sign for a village flagged up in Paul Muldoonrsquos lsquoThe Sonogramrsquo lsquoon the road to Spiddal a woman hitching a ridersquo For lsquoSpiddalrsquo Muldoon informs us read lsquohospitalrsquo (cf Spittle Hill in Sheffield Spitalfields in London) Some of my most vivid memories ndash in this regard ndash are of coming on Irish place names with a literary connection During a car ride from Belfast

10

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

Rob Hindle

This is a place in Attercliffe Sheffield ndash an intersection where the narrator of one of my poems in The Footing and the historical subjects he is tracking raise their eyes to the possibilities of the urban horizon Itrsquos a point on a map it is also a moment a place reached a pause in which the narratorrsquos present (which was mine sometime in 2010) collides

with the present of a gang of men in the spring of 1925 walking away from a crime ndash a fatal attack on an Attercliffe man for which two of them a few weeks later were to hang The title of my sequence is Flights and Traverses chosen because I wanted to indicate how the poems describe movement away from a point (the lsquoflightrsquo) and also the phenomenon of that movement (the lsquotraversersquo or crossing) But the sequence also has a subheading 5 Itineraries and it had an earlier working title A Cartography Both suggest the original motive I wanted to follow footsteps ndash but I was also interested in the imaginative possibilities of mapping and the itinerary lsquoItineraryrsquo has its roots in the Latin for lsquotravellingrsquo and is usually understood to mean either a plan or a record of a journey it can therefore refer to an experience anticipated or recollected There is also something of the professional it traditionally refers to a dayrsquos travel especially for the purpose of judging or preaching or lecturing In many senses it is a lsquosetting outrsquo

Cartography Flights and Traverses

From the corner you could go anywhere Leveson Street Warren Street under the arches of Norfolk Bridge over the riverhellip

3

When we consider the word lsquoitinerantrsquo however the intention is less about professing more about exchange We think of salesmen or peddlers tinkers wandererers tramps A story or song from the road for a fag or a sup There is something perhaps about a bargain or a contract This is implicit in the flights and traverses Irsquove chosen to map out A man pays his way out of his homeland at the toll house on Grindleford Bridge He accepts the deal and intrigued taken in I follow Here is a story a narrative a passage from something known to something unknown I have a memory of childhood a halt on a moorland track my dad lsquogetting the map outrsquo taking bearings making judgements We are at the moment between getting lost and finding a way forward ndash between the original itinerary and a new route made at that moment and not until then I find this moment entirely creative and settling and inspiring We might be on a track thousands of years deep but in passing along it we are itinerant we are at a point between the journey recorded and the journey anticipated And when we stop and take bearings and judge our

surroundings we acknowledge this I now stop with my family and lsquoget the map outrsquo Therersquos a milepost on the old turnpike road over Houndkirk Moor What you canrsquot see obviously is the other side ndash which due to the weather is a pitted surface entirely illegible

Where are you going Far as I can When will you get there Evening Where have you come from Over the moor Will you return Never

4

My ancestor Richard Marsden traversing the Moor and in sight neither of the valley he grew up in or of the town to which he was headed is at this point itinerant He must make a new map On midsummerrsquos day in 1842 an Attercliffe woman walked out of her house set herself behind the coffin of her son and started the slow walk through Sheffield to the General Cemetery The cortege passed 50 thousand people come to observe the procession of the Chartist Samuel Holberry broken by hard labour in Northallerton Gaol and dead at 27

When I set out on this journey the maps I consulted were relics the Blitz of 1940 and the go-getting 1960s had done for the medieval town Had I found a record of the route taken ndash most likely along Norfolk Street Union Street and South Street then up Cemetery Road ndash I would have felt compelled to follow it The Crucible Cafeacute Rouge the drills and hoardings on The Moor Fortunately I found

only the barest details a connection between two points and an understanding that the route must have crossed the river at Ladyrsquos Bridge where there had been a travellersrsquo chapel

Between a dry green wall and the brown clatter of water a milepost Tidʃwell ndash 10 Buxton ndash 17 WH JF On the north face just runes and weather

5

I had the opportunity then to make my own path to drift to become itinerant I could go off-grid turn corners into quiet slower route-ways peer through smashed windows I could stop and notice things growing ndash now in the middle of the city then at its edge the sounds of its industry still proximate to the rush of the Porter Brook

Over the Brook ndash now over the Ring Road ndash I should have climbed the hill to the old gate on Cemetery Road with its worm and leaf mould all ruin and renewal But honouring Holberry I wanted to make a way to the grander entrance on Cemetery Avenue to cross the Porter Brook once more formally this time paying my dues of passage

into the underworld from where I could look back take stock

a plate by the chancel where yoursquod drop a coin for safe journey the water light through the glass pattering the walls

They turn into Eyre Lane its workshops full of shades These were his neighbours they have stilled their wheels and files for him

In an alley near South Lane someone has planted flowers in drums and pails poppies daisies nasturtiums sweet peas pink and lilac against the black brick

6

There are other ways of map-making In 1932 my great-uncle Harold died in the South Yorkshire Asylum ndash later called the Middlewood Hospital and now a housing development which with its tidiness and discreet cameras aspires to gated status I never knew I had a great-uncle Harold He spent most of his life in institutions ndash his learning difficulties presumably too much for the wider world to handle ndash and died in this one aged 27 This was the first journey I took ndash a short harrowing walk from his parentsrsquo house off Hillsborough Corner to Middlewood It is the most personal section of Flights and Traverses not only because of Harold but because I recognise these terraced streets There is something inevitable too about the journey which though in terms of its topography is a gentle climb is emotionally and psychologically a descent I follow Harold towards his end beyond the tram terminus and I walk back ndash and down ndash through a bit of my own past

Now they can see where they came the line of people all the way back to the town Still they come

Now there is the click of a back door the chitter of a budgerigar Then you are hurrying from one of these houses hair brushed tangled feet booted your undone laces tripping behind you I follow

This was once my territory that hill with the GR post box at the bottom school at the top the park where I rushed along one day my mind gleeful and vicious running after me Middlewood childhood cant that thing in all our cellars I shouldnrsquot have dared I pay out my breaths like twine each step shortening

7

I expected ghosts at the Asylum in the bottle-green shade of the Cemetery by the milepost on Houndkirk Moor I got glimpses stilled vices through workshop windows arches upturned on the skin of the river the ghost of myself in the glass of Saville House Walking through an urban landscape particularly enables you to accrue perspective there is a traversing of time as well as space You lose yourself take note adjust your bearings set out again Cutting away from current thoroughfares you pass into other ways older narrower quieter You uncover or discover gennels doorways rat runs even when you are tracing itineraries which are irrevocable you are making new paths unfurling the twine of a narrative by which to mark your way back

The map shows where in December 1940 the bombs fell which was everywhere just about but even this catastrophe can be narrated The bombers came from a point in space departed for another the bombs fell thinly on the leafy places thickly on the old centre they fell crashing into the silence of the school s s

When I get off the bus on the Hathersage Road it is a winter afternoon the sun near to setting The shires range southwards hills woods fields North across the boundary stream the road begins its descent into Sheffield My long shadow stretching out in front of me First published on the Longbarrow Blog 12 January 2014

Stained glass exploding into Campo Lane corn from a slashed sack

Where I finish in Flights and Traverses is a picture of chaos

but spared the church its praying faithful its sinners

I start down

8

Ecgbert

People lust for this placeits arrangement of copses and small fields hills layering the light into the south

It is a no manrsquos land a glamourbetween the high emptinessand a ditch of water

Dore ndash an end and a beginningKing of Wessex and Merciacome to take oaths from York

A car pelts past me into Old EnglandEcgbertrsquos broad scīrs laid out like a cloth napped by the tread of his armiesrsquo blitzkrieg

The sun sets my shadow in the road north I start down into the cityits roofs pale along the tree-line

scīrs OE shires

Rob Hindle lsquoEcgbertrsquo is the first poem in Rob Hindlersquos sequence lsquoDore Moor to the Marples Hotelrsquo which closes Flights and Traverses five long poems and sequences by Hindle that appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013)

9

The Idea of Walsingham Chris Jones

Irsquove never been to Walsingham Irsquove got to within about six miles of the village an old white signpost with black lettering pointed the way If I ever journeyed that way I would probably end up disappointed For all its status as that most rare of things ndash a Catholic shrine a place of holy pilgrimage in England ndash my feeling is Irsquod find it wholly underwhelming ndash that shot at chintzy religiosity that sense of a miracle- ground somehow not quite believing in itself as special under those dull Norfolk skies I literally like the sound of lsquoWalsinghamrsquo ndash the name itself has a mythic quality to it a sense

of England of old an England that never really existed More pertinently I think Irsquom drawn to the idea of Walsingham as it is represented in the piece of literature that first drew my attention to its existence ndash Robert Lowellrsquos poem lsquoA Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketrsquo Alongside those rather far-off alien descriptions of whaling around Cape Cod Massachusetts Lowell ndash all of a sudden ndash goes on an imaginative pilgrimage to England lsquothe world shall come to Walsinghamrsquo I do have an interest in places that are name-checked in literature ndash in poems in particular though I donrsquot go on expeditions to find these locations out Better by far to come on East Coker by accident I certainly donrsquot think of Larkin every time I step on the platform at Sheffield station (lsquoDockery and Sonrsquo) though my head did turn once on a road out of Galway when I saw a sign for a village flagged up in Paul Muldoonrsquos lsquoThe Sonogramrsquo lsquoon the road to Spiddal a woman hitching a ridersquo For lsquoSpiddalrsquo Muldoon informs us read lsquohospitalrsquo (cf Spittle Hill in Sheffield Spitalfields in London) Some of my most vivid memories ndash in this regard ndash are of coming on Irish place names with a literary connection During a car ride from Belfast

10

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

When we consider the word lsquoitinerantrsquo however the intention is less about professing more about exchange We think of salesmen or peddlers tinkers wandererers tramps A story or song from the road for a fag or a sup There is something perhaps about a bargain or a contract This is implicit in the flights and traverses Irsquove chosen to map out A man pays his way out of his homeland at the toll house on Grindleford Bridge He accepts the deal and intrigued taken in I follow Here is a story a narrative a passage from something known to something unknown I have a memory of childhood a halt on a moorland track my dad lsquogetting the map outrsquo taking bearings making judgements We are at the moment between getting lost and finding a way forward ndash between the original itinerary and a new route made at that moment and not until then I find this moment entirely creative and settling and inspiring We might be on a track thousands of years deep but in passing along it we are itinerant we are at a point between the journey recorded and the journey anticipated And when we stop and take bearings and judge our

surroundings we acknowledge this I now stop with my family and lsquoget the map outrsquo Therersquos a milepost on the old turnpike road over Houndkirk Moor What you canrsquot see obviously is the other side ndash which due to the weather is a pitted surface entirely illegible

Where are you going Far as I can When will you get there Evening Where have you come from Over the moor Will you return Never

4

My ancestor Richard Marsden traversing the Moor and in sight neither of the valley he grew up in or of the town to which he was headed is at this point itinerant He must make a new map On midsummerrsquos day in 1842 an Attercliffe woman walked out of her house set herself behind the coffin of her son and started the slow walk through Sheffield to the General Cemetery The cortege passed 50 thousand people come to observe the procession of the Chartist Samuel Holberry broken by hard labour in Northallerton Gaol and dead at 27

When I set out on this journey the maps I consulted were relics the Blitz of 1940 and the go-getting 1960s had done for the medieval town Had I found a record of the route taken ndash most likely along Norfolk Street Union Street and South Street then up Cemetery Road ndash I would have felt compelled to follow it The Crucible Cafeacute Rouge the drills and hoardings on The Moor Fortunately I found

only the barest details a connection between two points and an understanding that the route must have crossed the river at Ladyrsquos Bridge where there had been a travellersrsquo chapel

Between a dry green wall and the brown clatter of water a milepost Tidʃwell ndash 10 Buxton ndash 17 WH JF On the north face just runes and weather

5

I had the opportunity then to make my own path to drift to become itinerant I could go off-grid turn corners into quiet slower route-ways peer through smashed windows I could stop and notice things growing ndash now in the middle of the city then at its edge the sounds of its industry still proximate to the rush of the Porter Brook

Over the Brook ndash now over the Ring Road ndash I should have climbed the hill to the old gate on Cemetery Road with its worm and leaf mould all ruin and renewal But honouring Holberry I wanted to make a way to the grander entrance on Cemetery Avenue to cross the Porter Brook once more formally this time paying my dues of passage

into the underworld from where I could look back take stock

a plate by the chancel where yoursquod drop a coin for safe journey the water light through the glass pattering the walls

They turn into Eyre Lane its workshops full of shades These were his neighbours they have stilled their wheels and files for him

In an alley near South Lane someone has planted flowers in drums and pails poppies daisies nasturtiums sweet peas pink and lilac against the black brick

6

There are other ways of map-making In 1932 my great-uncle Harold died in the South Yorkshire Asylum ndash later called the Middlewood Hospital and now a housing development which with its tidiness and discreet cameras aspires to gated status I never knew I had a great-uncle Harold He spent most of his life in institutions ndash his learning difficulties presumably too much for the wider world to handle ndash and died in this one aged 27 This was the first journey I took ndash a short harrowing walk from his parentsrsquo house off Hillsborough Corner to Middlewood It is the most personal section of Flights and Traverses not only because of Harold but because I recognise these terraced streets There is something inevitable too about the journey which though in terms of its topography is a gentle climb is emotionally and psychologically a descent I follow Harold towards his end beyond the tram terminus and I walk back ndash and down ndash through a bit of my own past

Now they can see where they came the line of people all the way back to the town Still they come

Now there is the click of a back door the chitter of a budgerigar Then you are hurrying from one of these houses hair brushed tangled feet booted your undone laces tripping behind you I follow

This was once my territory that hill with the GR post box at the bottom school at the top the park where I rushed along one day my mind gleeful and vicious running after me Middlewood childhood cant that thing in all our cellars I shouldnrsquot have dared I pay out my breaths like twine each step shortening

7

I expected ghosts at the Asylum in the bottle-green shade of the Cemetery by the milepost on Houndkirk Moor I got glimpses stilled vices through workshop windows arches upturned on the skin of the river the ghost of myself in the glass of Saville House Walking through an urban landscape particularly enables you to accrue perspective there is a traversing of time as well as space You lose yourself take note adjust your bearings set out again Cutting away from current thoroughfares you pass into other ways older narrower quieter You uncover or discover gennels doorways rat runs even when you are tracing itineraries which are irrevocable you are making new paths unfurling the twine of a narrative by which to mark your way back

The map shows where in December 1940 the bombs fell which was everywhere just about but even this catastrophe can be narrated The bombers came from a point in space departed for another the bombs fell thinly on the leafy places thickly on the old centre they fell crashing into the silence of the school s s

When I get off the bus on the Hathersage Road it is a winter afternoon the sun near to setting The shires range southwards hills woods fields North across the boundary stream the road begins its descent into Sheffield My long shadow stretching out in front of me First published on the Longbarrow Blog 12 January 2014

Stained glass exploding into Campo Lane corn from a slashed sack

Where I finish in Flights and Traverses is a picture of chaos

but spared the church its praying faithful its sinners

I start down

8

Ecgbert

People lust for this placeits arrangement of copses and small fields hills layering the light into the south

It is a no manrsquos land a glamourbetween the high emptinessand a ditch of water

Dore ndash an end and a beginningKing of Wessex and Merciacome to take oaths from York

A car pelts past me into Old EnglandEcgbertrsquos broad scīrs laid out like a cloth napped by the tread of his armiesrsquo blitzkrieg

The sun sets my shadow in the road north I start down into the cityits roofs pale along the tree-line

scīrs OE shires

Rob Hindle lsquoEcgbertrsquo is the first poem in Rob Hindlersquos sequence lsquoDore Moor to the Marples Hotelrsquo which closes Flights and Traverses five long poems and sequences by Hindle that appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013)

9

The Idea of Walsingham Chris Jones

Irsquove never been to Walsingham Irsquove got to within about six miles of the village an old white signpost with black lettering pointed the way If I ever journeyed that way I would probably end up disappointed For all its status as that most rare of things ndash a Catholic shrine a place of holy pilgrimage in England ndash my feeling is Irsquod find it wholly underwhelming ndash that shot at chintzy religiosity that sense of a miracle- ground somehow not quite believing in itself as special under those dull Norfolk skies I literally like the sound of lsquoWalsinghamrsquo ndash the name itself has a mythic quality to it a sense

of England of old an England that never really existed More pertinently I think Irsquom drawn to the idea of Walsingham as it is represented in the piece of literature that first drew my attention to its existence ndash Robert Lowellrsquos poem lsquoA Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketrsquo Alongside those rather far-off alien descriptions of whaling around Cape Cod Massachusetts Lowell ndash all of a sudden ndash goes on an imaginative pilgrimage to England lsquothe world shall come to Walsinghamrsquo I do have an interest in places that are name-checked in literature ndash in poems in particular though I donrsquot go on expeditions to find these locations out Better by far to come on East Coker by accident I certainly donrsquot think of Larkin every time I step on the platform at Sheffield station (lsquoDockery and Sonrsquo) though my head did turn once on a road out of Galway when I saw a sign for a village flagged up in Paul Muldoonrsquos lsquoThe Sonogramrsquo lsquoon the road to Spiddal a woman hitching a ridersquo For lsquoSpiddalrsquo Muldoon informs us read lsquohospitalrsquo (cf Spittle Hill in Sheffield Spitalfields in London) Some of my most vivid memories ndash in this regard ndash are of coming on Irish place names with a literary connection During a car ride from Belfast

10

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

My ancestor Richard Marsden traversing the Moor and in sight neither of the valley he grew up in or of the town to which he was headed is at this point itinerant He must make a new map On midsummerrsquos day in 1842 an Attercliffe woman walked out of her house set herself behind the coffin of her son and started the slow walk through Sheffield to the General Cemetery The cortege passed 50 thousand people come to observe the procession of the Chartist Samuel Holberry broken by hard labour in Northallerton Gaol and dead at 27

When I set out on this journey the maps I consulted were relics the Blitz of 1940 and the go-getting 1960s had done for the medieval town Had I found a record of the route taken ndash most likely along Norfolk Street Union Street and South Street then up Cemetery Road ndash I would have felt compelled to follow it The Crucible Cafeacute Rouge the drills and hoardings on The Moor Fortunately I found

only the barest details a connection between two points and an understanding that the route must have crossed the river at Ladyrsquos Bridge where there had been a travellersrsquo chapel

Between a dry green wall and the brown clatter of water a milepost Tidʃwell ndash 10 Buxton ndash 17 WH JF On the north face just runes and weather

5

I had the opportunity then to make my own path to drift to become itinerant I could go off-grid turn corners into quiet slower route-ways peer through smashed windows I could stop and notice things growing ndash now in the middle of the city then at its edge the sounds of its industry still proximate to the rush of the Porter Brook

Over the Brook ndash now over the Ring Road ndash I should have climbed the hill to the old gate on Cemetery Road with its worm and leaf mould all ruin and renewal But honouring Holberry I wanted to make a way to the grander entrance on Cemetery Avenue to cross the Porter Brook once more formally this time paying my dues of passage

into the underworld from where I could look back take stock

a plate by the chancel where yoursquod drop a coin for safe journey the water light through the glass pattering the walls

They turn into Eyre Lane its workshops full of shades These were his neighbours they have stilled their wheels and files for him

In an alley near South Lane someone has planted flowers in drums and pails poppies daisies nasturtiums sweet peas pink and lilac against the black brick

6

There are other ways of map-making In 1932 my great-uncle Harold died in the South Yorkshire Asylum ndash later called the Middlewood Hospital and now a housing development which with its tidiness and discreet cameras aspires to gated status I never knew I had a great-uncle Harold He spent most of his life in institutions ndash his learning difficulties presumably too much for the wider world to handle ndash and died in this one aged 27 This was the first journey I took ndash a short harrowing walk from his parentsrsquo house off Hillsborough Corner to Middlewood It is the most personal section of Flights and Traverses not only because of Harold but because I recognise these terraced streets There is something inevitable too about the journey which though in terms of its topography is a gentle climb is emotionally and psychologically a descent I follow Harold towards his end beyond the tram terminus and I walk back ndash and down ndash through a bit of my own past

Now they can see where they came the line of people all the way back to the town Still they come

Now there is the click of a back door the chitter of a budgerigar Then you are hurrying from one of these houses hair brushed tangled feet booted your undone laces tripping behind you I follow

This was once my territory that hill with the GR post box at the bottom school at the top the park where I rushed along one day my mind gleeful and vicious running after me Middlewood childhood cant that thing in all our cellars I shouldnrsquot have dared I pay out my breaths like twine each step shortening

7

I expected ghosts at the Asylum in the bottle-green shade of the Cemetery by the milepost on Houndkirk Moor I got glimpses stilled vices through workshop windows arches upturned on the skin of the river the ghost of myself in the glass of Saville House Walking through an urban landscape particularly enables you to accrue perspective there is a traversing of time as well as space You lose yourself take note adjust your bearings set out again Cutting away from current thoroughfares you pass into other ways older narrower quieter You uncover or discover gennels doorways rat runs even when you are tracing itineraries which are irrevocable you are making new paths unfurling the twine of a narrative by which to mark your way back

The map shows where in December 1940 the bombs fell which was everywhere just about but even this catastrophe can be narrated The bombers came from a point in space departed for another the bombs fell thinly on the leafy places thickly on the old centre they fell crashing into the silence of the school s s

When I get off the bus on the Hathersage Road it is a winter afternoon the sun near to setting The shires range southwards hills woods fields North across the boundary stream the road begins its descent into Sheffield My long shadow stretching out in front of me First published on the Longbarrow Blog 12 January 2014

Stained glass exploding into Campo Lane corn from a slashed sack

Where I finish in Flights and Traverses is a picture of chaos

but spared the church its praying faithful its sinners

I start down

8

Ecgbert

People lust for this placeits arrangement of copses and small fields hills layering the light into the south

It is a no manrsquos land a glamourbetween the high emptinessand a ditch of water

Dore ndash an end and a beginningKing of Wessex and Merciacome to take oaths from York

A car pelts past me into Old EnglandEcgbertrsquos broad scīrs laid out like a cloth napped by the tread of his armiesrsquo blitzkrieg

The sun sets my shadow in the road north I start down into the cityits roofs pale along the tree-line

scīrs OE shires

Rob Hindle lsquoEcgbertrsquo is the first poem in Rob Hindlersquos sequence lsquoDore Moor to the Marples Hotelrsquo which closes Flights and Traverses five long poems and sequences by Hindle that appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013)

9

The Idea of Walsingham Chris Jones

Irsquove never been to Walsingham Irsquove got to within about six miles of the village an old white signpost with black lettering pointed the way If I ever journeyed that way I would probably end up disappointed For all its status as that most rare of things ndash a Catholic shrine a place of holy pilgrimage in England ndash my feeling is Irsquod find it wholly underwhelming ndash that shot at chintzy religiosity that sense of a miracle- ground somehow not quite believing in itself as special under those dull Norfolk skies I literally like the sound of lsquoWalsinghamrsquo ndash the name itself has a mythic quality to it a sense

of England of old an England that never really existed More pertinently I think Irsquom drawn to the idea of Walsingham as it is represented in the piece of literature that first drew my attention to its existence ndash Robert Lowellrsquos poem lsquoA Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketrsquo Alongside those rather far-off alien descriptions of whaling around Cape Cod Massachusetts Lowell ndash all of a sudden ndash goes on an imaginative pilgrimage to England lsquothe world shall come to Walsinghamrsquo I do have an interest in places that are name-checked in literature ndash in poems in particular though I donrsquot go on expeditions to find these locations out Better by far to come on East Coker by accident I certainly donrsquot think of Larkin every time I step on the platform at Sheffield station (lsquoDockery and Sonrsquo) though my head did turn once on a road out of Galway when I saw a sign for a village flagged up in Paul Muldoonrsquos lsquoThe Sonogramrsquo lsquoon the road to Spiddal a woman hitching a ridersquo For lsquoSpiddalrsquo Muldoon informs us read lsquohospitalrsquo (cf Spittle Hill in Sheffield Spitalfields in London) Some of my most vivid memories ndash in this regard ndash are of coming on Irish place names with a literary connection During a car ride from Belfast

10

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

I had the opportunity then to make my own path to drift to become itinerant I could go off-grid turn corners into quiet slower route-ways peer through smashed windows I could stop and notice things growing ndash now in the middle of the city then at its edge the sounds of its industry still proximate to the rush of the Porter Brook

Over the Brook ndash now over the Ring Road ndash I should have climbed the hill to the old gate on Cemetery Road with its worm and leaf mould all ruin and renewal But honouring Holberry I wanted to make a way to the grander entrance on Cemetery Avenue to cross the Porter Brook once more formally this time paying my dues of passage

into the underworld from where I could look back take stock

a plate by the chancel where yoursquod drop a coin for safe journey the water light through the glass pattering the walls

They turn into Eyre Lane its workshops full of shades These were his neighbours they have stilled their wheels and files for him

In an alley near South Lane someone has planted flowers in drums and pails poppies daisies nasturtiums sweet peas pink and lilac against the black brick

6

There are other ways of map-making In 1932 my great-uncle Harold died in the South Yorkshire Asylum ndash later called the Middlewood Hospital and now a housing development which with its tidiness and discreet cameras aspires to gated status I never knew I had a great-uncle Harold He spent most of his life in institutions ndash his learning difficulties presumably too much for the wider world to handle ndash and died in this one aged 27 This was the first journey I took ndash a short harrowing walk from his parentsrsquo house off Hillsborough Corner to Middlewood It is the most personal section of Flights and Traverses not only because of Harold but because I recognise these terraced streets There is something inevitable too about the journey which though in terms of its topography is a gentle climb is emotionally and psychologically a descent I follow Harold towards his end beyond the tram terminus and I walk back ndash and down ndash through a bit of my own past

Now they can see where they came the line of people all the way back to the town Still they come

Now there is the click of a back door the chitter of a budgerigar Then you are hurrying from one of these houses hair brushed tangled feet booted your undone laces tripping behind you I follow

This was once my territory that hill with the GR post box at the bottom school at the top the park where I rushed along one day my mind gleeful and vicious running after me Middlewood childhood cant that thing in all our cellars I shouldnrsquot have dared I pay out my breaths like twine each step shortening

7

I expected ghosts at the Asylum in the bottle-green shade of the Cemetery by the milepost on Houndkirk Moor I got glimpses stilled vices through workshop windows arches upturned on the skin of the river the ghost of myself in the glass of Saville House Walking through an urban landscape particularly enables you to accrue perspective there is a traversing of time as well as space You lose yourself take note adjust your bearings set out again Cutting away from current thoroughfares you pass into other ways older narrower quieter You uncover or discover gennels doorways rat runs even when you are tracing itineraries which are irrevocable you are making new paths unfurling the twine of a narrative by which to mark your way back

The map shows where in December 1940 the bombs fell which was everywhere just about but even this catastrophe can be narrated The bombers came from a point in space departed for another the bombs fell thinly on the leafy places thickly on the old centre they fell crashing into the silence of the school s s

When I get off the bus on the Hathersage Road it is a winter afternoon the sun near to setting The shires range southwards hills woods fields North across the boundary stream the road begins its descent into Sheffield My long shadow stretching out in front of me First published on the Longbarrow Blog 12 January 2014

Stained glass exploding into Campo Lane corn from a slashed sack

Where I finish in Flights and Traverses is a picture of chaos

but spared the church its praying faithful its sinners

I start down

8

Ecgbert

People lust for this placeits arrangement of copses and small fields hills layering the light into the south

It is a no manrsquos land a glamourbetween the high emptinessand a ditch of water

Dore ndash an end and a beginningKing of Wessex and Merciacome to take oaths from York

A car pelts past me into Old EnglandEcgbertrsquos broad scīrs laid out like a cloth napped by the tread of his armiesrsquo blitzkrieg

The sun sets my shadow in the road north I start down into the cityits roofs pale along the tree-line

scīrs OE shires

Rob Hindle lsquoEcgbertrsquo is the first poem in Rob Hindlersquos sequence lsquoDore Moor to the Marples Hotelrsquo which closes Flights and Traverses five long poems and sequences by Hindle that appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013)

9

The Idea of Walsingham Chris Jones

Irsquove never been to Walsingham Irsquove got to within about six miles of the village an old white signpost with black lettering pointed the way If I ever journeyed that way I would probably end up disappointed For all its status as that most rare of things ndash a Catholic shrine a place of holy pilgrimage in England ndash my feeling is Irsquod find it wholly underwhelming ndash that shot at chintzy religiosity that sense of a miracle- ground somehow not quite believing in itself as special under those dull Norfolk skies I literally like the sound of lsquoWalsinghamrsquo ndash the name itself has a mythic quality to it a sense

of England of old an England that never really existed More pertinently I think Irsquom drawn to the idea of Walsingham as it is represented in the piece of literature that first drew my attention to its existence ndash Robert Lowellrsquos poem lsquoA Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketrsquo Alongside those rather far-off alien descriptions of whaling around Cape Cod Massachusetts Lowell ndash all of a sudden ndash goes on an imaginative pilgrimage to England lsquothe world shall come to Walsinghamrsquo I do have an interest in places that are name-checked in literature ndash in poems in particular though I donrsquot go on expeditions to find these locations out Better by far to come on East Coker by accident I certainly donrsquot think of Larkin every time I step on the platform at Sheffield station (lsquoDockery and Sonrsquo) though my head did turn once on a road out of Galway when I saw a sign for a village flagged up in Paul Muldoonrsquos lsquoThe Sonogramrsquo lsquoon the road to Spiddal a woman hitching a ridersquo For lsquoSpiddalrsquo Muldoon informs us read lsquohospitalrsquo (cf Spittle Hill in Sheffield Spitalfields in London) Some of my most vivid memories ndash in this regard ndash are of coming on Irish place names with a literary connection During a car ride from Belfast

10

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

There are other ways of map-making In 1932 my great-uncle Harold died in the South Yorkshire Asylum ndash later called the Middlewood Hospital and now a housing development which with its tidiness and discreet cameras aspires to gated status I never knew I had a great-uncle Harold He spent most of his life in institutions ndash his learning difficulties presumably too much for the wider world to handle ndash and died in this one aged 27 This was the first journey I took ndash a short harrowing walk from his parentsrsquo house off Hillsborough Corner to Middlewood It is the most personal section of Flights and Traverses not only because of Harold but because I recognise these terraced streets There is something inevitable too about the journey which though in terms of its topography is a gentle climb is emotionally and psychologically a descent I follow Harold towards his end beyond the tram terminus and I walk back ndash and down ndash through a bit of my own past

Now they can see where they came the line of people all the way back to the town Still they come

Now there is the click of a back door the chitter of a budgerigar Then you are hurrying from one of these houses hair brushed tangled feet booted your undone laces tripping behind you I follow

This was once my territory that hill with the GR post box at the bottom school at the top the park where I rushed along one day my mind gleeful and vicious running after me Middlewood childhood cant that thing in all our cellars I shouldnrsquot have dared I pay out my breaths like twine each step shortening

7

I expected ghosts at the Asylum in the bottle-green shade of the Cemetery by the milepost on Houndkirk Moor I got glimpses stilled vices through workshop windows arches upturned on the skin of the river the ghost of myself in the glass of Saville House Walking through an urban landscape particularly enables you to accrue perspective there is a traversing of time as well as space You lose yourself take note adjust your bearings set out again Cutting away from current thoroughfares you pass into other ways older narrower quieter You uncover or discover gennels doorways rat runs even when you are tracing itineraries which are irrevocable you are making new paths unfurling the twine of a narrative by which to mark your way back

The map shows where in December 1940 the bombs fell which was everywhere just about but even this catastrophe can be narrated The bombers came from a point in space departed for another the bombs fell thinly on the leafy places thickly on the old centre they fell crashing into the silence of the school s s

When I get off the bus on the Hathersage Road it is a winter afternoon the sun near to setting The shires range southwards hills woods fields North across the boundary stream the road begins its descent into Sheffield My long shadow stretching out in front of me First published on the Longbarrow Blog 12 January 2014

Stained glass exploding into Campo Lane corn from a slashed sack

Where I finish in Flights and Traverses is a picture of chaos

but spared the church its praying faithful its sinners

I start down

8

Ecgbert

People lust for this placeits arrangement of copses and small fields hills layering the light into the south

It is a no manrsquos land a glamourbetween the high emptinessand a ditch of water

Dore ndash an end and a beginningKing of Wessex and Merciacome to take oaths from York

A car pelts past me into Old EnglandEcgbertrsquos broad scīrs laid out like a cloth napped by the tread of his armiesrsquo blitzkrieg

The sun sets my shadow in the road north I start down into the cityits roofs pale along the tree-line

scīrs OE shires

Rob Hindle lsquoEcgbertrsquo is the first poem in Rob Hindlersquos sequence lsquoDore Moor to the Marples Hotelrsquo which closes Flights and Traverses five long poems and sequences by Hindle that appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013)

9

The Idea of Walsingham Chris Jones

Irsquove never been to Walsingham Irsquove got to within about six miles of the village an old white signpost with black lettering pointed the way If I ever journeyed that way I would probably end up disappointed For all its status as that most rare of things ndash a Catholic shrine a place of holy pilgrimage in England ndash my feeling is Irsquod find it wholly underwhelming ndash that shot at chintzy religiosity that sense of a miracle- ground somehow not quite believing in itself as special under those dull Norfolk skies I literally like the sound of lsquoWalsinghamrsquo ndash the name itself has a mythic quality to it a sense

of England of old an England that never really existed More pertinently I think Irsquom drawn to the idea of Walsingham as it is represented in the piece of literature that first drew my attention to its existence ndash Robert Lowellrsquos poem lsquoA Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketrsquo Alongside those rather far-off alien descriptions of whaling around Cape Cod Massachusetts Lowell ndash all of a sudden ndash goes on an imaginative pilgrimage to England lsquothe world shall come to Walsinghamrsquo I do have an interest in places that are name-checked in literature ndash in poems in particular though I donrsquot go on expeditions to find these locations out Better by far to come on East Coker by accident I certainly donrsquot think of Larkin every time I step on the platform at Sheffield station (lsquoDockery and Sonrsquo) though my head did turn once on a road out of Galway when I saw a sign for a village flagged up in Paul Muldoonrsquos lsquoThe Sonogramrsquo lsquoon the road to Spiddal a woman hitching a ridersquo For lsquoSpiddalrsquo Muldoon informs us read lsquohospitalrsquo (cf Spittle Hill in Sheffield Spitalfields in London) Some of my most vivid memories ndash in this regard ndash are of coming on Irish place names with a literary connection During a car ride from Belfast

10

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

I expected ghosts at the Asylum in the bottle-green shade of the Cemetery by the milepost on Houndkirk Moor I got glimpses stilled vices through workshop windows arches upturned on the skin of the river the ghost of myself in the glass of Saville House Walking through an urban landscape particularly enables you to accrue perspective there is a traversing of time as well as space You lose yourself take note adjust your bearings set out again Cutting away from current thoroughfares you pass into other ways older narrower quieter You uncover or discover gennels doorways rat runs even when you are tracing itineraries which are irrevocable you are making new paths unfurling the twine of a narrative by which to mark your way back

The map shows where in December 1940 the bombs fell which was everywhere just about but even this catastrophe can be narrated The bombers came from a point in space departed for another the bombs fell thinly on the leafy places thickly on the old centre they fell crashing into the silence of the school s s

When I get off the bus on the Hathersage Road it is a winter afternoon the sun near to setting The shires range southwards hills woods fields North across the boundary stream the road begins its descent into Sheffield My long shadow stretching out in front of me First published on the Longbarrow Blog 12 January 2014

Stained glass exploding into Campo Lane corn from a slashed sack

Where I finish in Flights and Traverses is a picture of chaos

but spared the church its praying faithful its sinners

I start down

8

Ecgbert

People lust for this placeits arrangement of copses and small fields hills layering the light into the south

It is a no manrsquos land a glamourbetween the high emptinessand a ditch of water

Dore ndash an end and a beginningKing of Wessex and Merciacome to take oaths from York

A car pelts past me into Old EnglandEcgbertrsquos broad scīrs laid out like a cloth napped by the tread of his armiesrsquo blitzkrieg

The sun sets my shadow in the road north I start down into the cityits roofs pale along the tree-line

scīrs OE shires

Rob Hindle lsquoEcgbertrsquo is the first poem in Rob Hindlersquos sequence lsquoDore Moor to the Marples Hotelrsquo which closes Flights and Traverses five long poems and sequences by Hindle that appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013)

9

The Idea of Walsingham Chris Jones

Irsquove never been to Walsingham Irsquove got to within about six miles of the village an old white signpost with black lettering pointed the way If I ever journeyed that way I would probably end up disappointed For all its status as that most rare of things ndash a Catholic shrine a place of holy pilgrimage in England ndash my feeling is Irsquod find it wholly underwhelming ndash that shot at chintzy religiosity that sense of a miracle- ground somehow not quite believing in itself as special under those dull Norfolk skies I literally like the sound of lsquoWalsinghamrsquo ndash the name itself has a mythic quality to it a sense

of England of old an England that never really existed More pertinently I think Irsquom drawn to the idea of Walsingham as it is represented in the piece of literature that first drew my attention to its existence ndash Robert Lowellrsquos poem lsquoA Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketrsquo Alongside those rather far-off alien descriptions of whaling around Cape Cod Massachusetts Lowell ndash all of a sudden ndash goes on an imaginative pilgrimage to England lsquothe world shall come to Walsinghamrsquo I do have an interest in places that are name-checked in literature ndash in poems in particular though I donrsquot go on expeditions to find these locations out Better by far to come on East Coker by accident I certainly donrsquot think of Larkin every time I step on the platform at Sheffield station (lsquoDockery and Sonrsquo) though my head did turn once on a road out of Galway when I saw a sign for a village flagged up in Paul Muldoonrsquos lsquoThe Sonogramrsquo lsquoon the road to Spiddal a woman hitching a ridersquo For lsquoSpiddalrsquo Muldoon informs us read lsquohospitalrsquo (cf Spittle Hill in Sheffield Spitalfields in London) Some of my most vivid memories ndash in this regard ndash are of coming on Irish place names with a literary connection During a car ride from Belfast

10

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

Ecgbert

People lust for this placeits arrangement of copses and small fields hills layering the light into the south

It is a no manrsquos land a glamourbetween the high emptinessand a ditch of water

Dore ndash an end and a beginningKing of Wessex and Merciacome to take oaths from York

A car pelts past me into Old EnglandEcgbertrsquos broad scīrs laid out like a cloth napped by the tread of his armiesrsquo blitzkrieg

The sun sets my shadow in the road north I start down into the cityits roofs pale along the tree-line

scīrs OE shires

Rob Hindle lsquoEcgbertrsquo is the first poem in Rob Hindlersquos sequence lsquoDore Moor to the Marples Hotelrsquo which closes Flights and Traverses five long poems and sequences by Hindle that appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013)

9

The Idea of Walsingham Chris Jones

Irsquove never been to Walsingham Irsquove got to within about six miles of the village an old white signpost with black lettering pointed the way If I ever journeyed that way I would probably end up disappointed For all its status as that most rare of things ndash a Catholic shrine a place of holy pilgrimage in England ndash my feeling is Irsquod find it wholly underwhelming ndash that shot at chintzy religiosity that sense of a miracle- ground somehow not quite believing in itself as special under those dull Norfolk skies I literally like the sound of lsquoWalsinghamrsquo ndash the name itself has a mythic quality to it a sense

of England of old an England that never really existed More pertinently I think Irsquom drawn to the idea of Walsingham as it is represented in the piece of literature that first drew my attention to its existence ndash Robert Lowellrsquos poem lsquoA Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketrsquo Alongside those rather far-off alien descriptions of whaling around Cape Cod Massachusetts Lowell ndash all of a sudden ndash goes on an imaginative pilgrimage to England lsquothe world shall come to Walsinghamrsquo I do have an interest in places that are name-checked in literature ndash in poems in particular though I donrsquot go on expeditions to find these locations out Better by far to come on East Coker by accident I certainly donrsquot think of Larkin every time I step on the platform at Sheffield station (lsquoDockery and Sonrsquo) though my head did turn once on a road out of Galway when I saw a sign for a village flagged up in Paul Muldoonrsquos lsquoThe Sonogramrsquo lsquoon the road to Spiddal a woman hitching a ridersquo For lsquoSpiddalrsquo Muldoon informs us read lsquohospitalrsquo (cf Spittle Hill in Sheffield Spitalfields in London) Some of my most vivid memories ndash in this regard ndash are of coming on Irish place names with a literary connection During a car ride from Belfast

10

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

The Idea of Walsingham Chris Jones

Irsquove never been to Walsingham Irsquove got to within about six miles of the village an old white signpost with black lettering pointed the way If I ever journeyed that way I would probably end up disappointed For all its status as that most rare of things ndash a Catholic shrine a place of holy pilgrimage in England ndash my feeling is Irsquod find it wholly underwhelming ndash that shot at chintzy religiosity that sense of a miracle- ground somehow not quite believing in itself as special under those dull Norfolk skies I literally like the sound of lsquoWalsinghamrsquo ndash the name itself has a mythic quality to it a sense

of England of old an England that never really existed More pertinently I think Irsquom drawn to the idea of Walsingham as it is represented in the piece of literature that first drew my attention to its existence ndash Robert Lowellrsquos poem lsquoA Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketrsquo Alongside those rather far-off alien descriptions of whaling around Cape Cod Massachusetts Lowell ndash all of a sudden ndash goes on an imaginative pilgrimage to England lsquothe world shall come to Walsinghamrsquo I do have an interest in places that are name-checked in literature ndash in poems in particular though I donrsquot go on expeditions to find these locations out Better by far to come on East Coker by accident I certainly donrsquot think of Larkin every time I step on the platform at Sheffield station (lsquoDockery and Sonrsquo) though my head did turn once on a road out of Galway when I saw a sign for a village flagged up in Paul Muldoonrsquos lsquoThe Sonogramrsquo lsquoon the road to Spiddal a woman hitching a ridersquo For lsquoSpiddalrsquo Muldoon informs us read lsquohospitalrsquo (cf Spittle Hill in Sheffield Spitalfields in London) Some of my most vivid memories ndash in this regard ndash are of coming on Irish place names with a literary connection During a car ride from Belfast

10

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

to Donegal I realised we were heading into territory mapped out by Seamus Heaney when we drove past Toome (see the poems lsquoToomersquo lsquoThe Toome Roadrsquo lsquoAt Toome-bridgersquo) Perhaps more spectacularly for me ndash because it was so unexpected ndash I drove through Oughterard on a grey autumn afternoon back in the 1990s Michael Furey Grettarsquos long-deceased lover in James Joycersquos story lsquoThe Deadrsquo came from Oughterard As I drove through the town I thought then and there that Michael wouldnrsquot be worrying himself over women like Gretta any more ndash he would be playing golf I once went on a camping holiday to the coastal town of Levanto in Liguria Northern Italy Although the town is situated near to the enigmatically titled Golfo dei Poeti (Bay of Poets) this semiotic prompt in no way prepared me for the dark frisson I felt when I came across a crossroads signpost vaguely aimed in the direction of Lerici Byron Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed there for a while on their tour of Europe Well to be more accurate the Shelleys lodged further along the coast Lerici is the port where Percy moored his boat the boat that tipped him into the ocean on the 8th of July 1822 I first came across the word lsquoLericirsquo in a poem by Thom Gunn when I was about fifteen years old Where is this place I thought And thatrsquos the imaginatively constructed space I thought about when I came twenty years later to within a couple of miles of the town Gunnrsquos Lerici lsquoShelley was drowned near here Arms at his side He fell submissive through the wavesrsquo One morning I travelled up the coast to Genoa on the fast train About halfway through the journey the loco rattled through Rapallo ndash the stationrsquos name plate there and gone in an instant ndash and I waved at Ezra Poundrsquos sullen ghost standing on the platform Occasionally I come on places that clarify or add texture to the readings of poems in which they are mentioned The best example of this I can give relates to a work by W S Graham lsquoThe Thermal Stairrsquo The poem begins That lsquoDing Dongrsquo used to throw me Was Graham talking about a church and its bells or was he being whimsical a manner he cultivates now and then in his writing Nearing our destination on a long drive down to Zennor Cornwall (Graham country) we stopped at the crossroads of some leafy lane and there to my right was a peeling sign pointing the way to Ding Dong It had never occurred to me

I called today Peter and you were away I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea

11

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

Ding Dong was an actual constructed space that it had the same kind of veracity and tenor as say Frome Swindon or Quorn Go on look it up Ding Dong moor For all my interest in place names and poetry I donrsquot often pin my pieces explicitly to a locale a parish a street I did write a sequence of poems about the River Don and named various districts of Sheffield as part of the process of tracking its journey through the city but most of the time I donrsquot push towards this kind of poetry veacuteriteacute When I wrote the extended poem lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo a work concerned with pre-Reformation wall art and its destruction I wondered about providing the action with a precise geographical lsquofixrsquo I ruminated on the idea of a hidden or remote valley somewhere but in the end decided against naming names in this broadest sense A real location would have meant me knuckling down to do a lot more research about the environment the lie of the land I just wanted to get on and write the poem For all this regional vagueness there are two churches named in lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo in the hope that it embeds a line of authenticity into the narrative I spent ages poring over possible saints and in the end came up with Saint Botolphrsquos (church one) because itrsquos a strange and wonderful name and Botolph was the patron saint of travellers and Saint Annersquos (church two) because I wanted a saint with a monosyllabic name to accommodate the opening line of that particular section I was thinking about (lsquoSaint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallrsquo) From thereon in specificity only really occurs in other aspects of the poetry the description of wall art decorating various (unnamed) churches and what these images signified to people in seventeenth century England

The artwork accompanying this piece is by Paul Evans (from the series Death and the Gallant a response to Chris Jonesrsquos sonnet sequence of the same name) An earlier version of this essay first appeared on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2015

12

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

The Crucifixion

Saint Annersquos The Passion on a southern wallWhen Nicodemus hefts his body down this artist shows by Christrsquos pulled armsthe frame is slight yet burdenrsquos allAs Brown stirs water into pails of chalkI trail my shadow round this Lordrsquos demesne ndash closed cottages forge tavern farm ndash to root out screens made scarce and shrouded panels

Irsquove dug up roods like briars from a ditchonce found a Christopher standing in a yard Doused in this wheat-earsrsquo ruby lightI absolve my eyes from searching hardI turn a bottlersquos murky shine then liftit high to pledge my disregard

Chris Jones

lsquoThe Crucifixionrsquo is the third poem in Chris Jonesrsquos sequence lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo first published in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013) and subsequently in Chris Jonesrsquos collection Skin (Longbarrow Press 2015)

13

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

From The Impossibility of Abstraction (2019) Karl Hurst

14

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

The First Cut Nancy Gaffield February 2016

In her long poem Drift Caroline Bergvall says ldquoEventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting pointrdquo She refers to this process as ldquoto north oneself rdquo This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem Meridian I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed

and reordered by history and memory Meridian is a long poem about time walking and lines lines both real and imaginary in all their forms It is also a walking practice walking in the Wordsworthian sense of ldquoa mode not of travelling but of beingrdquomdasha process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walkingmdash the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter stepped lines of William Carlos Williams undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets Lorine Niedecker Helen Adam John Clare Iain Sinclairmdashto name but a few I chose to write Meridian as a long poem Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires ldquoto achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modesrdquo To do this the long poem incorporates other texts voices political speech bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writerrsquos role in making her way through such often-resistant material Indeed the process of writing of such a text is often part of the materialmdashit is self-reflexive The long poem itself is a challengemdashboth for reader and writer for example how to maintain a

15

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

sense of momentum and coherence howwhen to end it choosing the most effective form On the other hand it offers greater space to develop ideas it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing it can bring in other registers discourses genres Since the early 20th century experiments in innovative language-based long poems often disjunctive in form have been gathering momentum In particular Irsquom interested in long poems by women Gertrude Steinrsquos Tender Buttons Rosmarie Waldroprsquos The Reproduction of Profiles Susan Howersquos The Europe of Trusts Sharon Doubiagorsquos Hard Country Lynn Hejinianrsquos A Border Comedy not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessisrsquo Drafts These poems often recover political philosophical or historical material and pay close attention to the way language especially its rhythms silences gaps conventions and expectations engages with the reader

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas concepts and methods of psychogeography Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlanersquos Landmarks Roger Deakinrsquos Wildwood Nan Shepherdrsquos The Living Mountain Barry Lopezrsquos Arctic Dreams Peter Davidsonrsquos Distance and Memorymdashso I knew landscapegeography would once again feature in whatever I was to write but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas As Guy Debord accurately said psychogeography is a concept with

ldquoa rather pleasing vaguenessrdquo His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit To do this they explored different ways of getting lost for example by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide However in general psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals It embraces chance and coincidence concurrent with an alertness to

16

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment it is serious but fun it is often political and critical of the status quo One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the deacuterive an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation Deacuterive = drift aimless wandering through a place guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful recon-struction This turning around (deacutetournment) is key to the situationist agenda it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology1 The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment excavating the past and recording it with the present revealing the nature of what lies beneath My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge finding my way I canrsquot read a map or a compassmdashand as a result am always lost Not only is this a huge frustration when lost I am susceptible to panic attacks so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in timeplace (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889) Happily then I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshiremdashtotal length 275 miles Around this time Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing His process he explained always seemed to happen in four parts There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a questjourney That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didnrsquot expect to be then a moving away from what you created andor segueing into the next sectionproject Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward Certainly there was a synergy the trail is divided into four books so I am using each book as a device to section the collection Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick Part III is Hardwick to Boston and Part IV is Boston to the Humber Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk

17

So far I have walked to Epping Forest and I intend to walk the rest of the route this summer While walking I record observations and events in real time these appear on the page using indentations to indicate voice or breath change and emphasis Before each walk I do some basic research into the places en route but I do not plan the content It is very important that the poem leads me I stop to take notes as I walk sometimes record things into a recording app on my phone and take photographs At the end of the day I write up the daymdashand finish the section related to each walk within five days Inevitably I engage in ldquosoul-wanderingrdquo so associative leaps and

digressions are made including sensory description bits of narrative and lived experience mainly relating to whatever is preoccupying me at the time the passage of time what I am reading around that journey and conversationsmdashboth real and imaginary Part II has a section called ldquoThe First Cutrdquo This is composed by using the cut-up method I took every tenth sentence from ldquoThe First Walkrdquo in Iain Sinclairrsquos Lights Out for the Territory I cut the sentences up into individual words and phrases and collaged these into the poem along with my notes and observations of the dayrsquos walk And this is where I am now about to enter Epping Forest which Irsquove been putting off because of all the stories Irsquove heard of the woodsrsquo dark reputation I wonder what will happen further ahead through Forest and into the Fens And Lincolnshire

1 If there is an application of this concept to Meridian it is that I am trying to break through the paternalistic and geocentric relationships inherent in the L[l]ine First drafted in February 2016 (at the outset of the Meridian project) The walk was completed in autumn 2017 this essay was published on the Longbarrow Blog on 6 March 2019

18

Hardwick to Chatteris mdashAnd toward what dates do we write ourselves Paul Celan Meridian

The poem chooses December 5the day of fracturetime amp everythingis out of jointboundaries borders places dissolveinto an in-between-ness amp a nowhere

See Holbeinrsquos ldquoThe Ambassadorsrdquo Instead of viewing it straight on stand very close to it on the right hand side Only then does the oblong shape in the bottom centre reveal itself to be a human skull Anamorphosis

Today the path traces the journey in to landscapenot a noun but a verbnot an object to be examined ora text to be read buta process marking the trace of its passing

19

The trace defines withholds remains after the footsteps inscribing it have passed drawing you backwards into itself

I cannot walk this waywithout thinking of you

stand close to me now

Nancy Gaffield

lsquoHardwick to Chatterisrsquo appears in Nancy Gaffieldrsquos collection Meridian (Longbarrow Press 2019)

20

Along a Line Mark Goodwin

I have what could be described as a penchant for balancing along things ndash fence rails or tree branches or cables etc Such balancing is intensified walking I so enjoy the precision of toe ball-of-foot amp heel placed on solidity and feeling for friction as the rest of my body sways in air and pulls only against its own muscles to stay placed and connected by feet As a poet I have a penchant for lines for sound-shapes amp text-shapes measured out sometimes even in feet The metaphor of balancer precisely stepping along a rail equalling poet is no metaphor at all nor a symbol Humans walk and humans balance and humans speak Very near to where I live there is a country park It has an abundance of solid lines to balance along One of my favourite lines is made from

old railway track bolted to short pillars This single railway rail is just a foot or two above the water of the river Soar and it was placed here as a guard to keep boats off the weir Just the other day an elderly couple paused on the walkway running parallel with the rail they watched me intently as I walked backwards along the line When I got to one of the pillars I stood on its rectangular top and got chatting with the couple I mentioned to them how last summer an elderly woman probably in her mid-seventies had watched me just as intently as they and that when Irsquod finished my walk she came over to me smiling She was delighted and told me that she had last walked along that very rail when she was twelve years old When I first started balancing in the park I was a little shy or rather I didnrsquot want people to think I was showing off so I would try to wait until no one was about This was almost impossible and so I was hardly getting any balancing done And to grow the power of balance one has to do a lot of it So I decided that I must

Mark on the weir rail Birstall Leicestershire (photo by Elaine Miller)

21

balance whatever whoever was about and that part of the practice should be to ignore whoever was watching me or speaking to me whilst I was balancing but that once done with my balancing should someone ask me about it I should tell them as much as I could This practice has led me into delightful and sometimes inspiring encounters with various kinds of people from cheeky teenagers through to a serious

but gentle Indian doctor Most people have been inspired by my balancing and have inspired me by the ways they have questioned me

There have been a few incidents Once on the railway rail by the weir a lad threw a football at me It skimmed in front of my face I didnrsquot even flinch not one teeter My body was so focused on being in balance on the rail that it or was it me just accepted the flying object as being part of the place amp the moment I suppose sudden ducks amp low-flying geese had helped in my training In no way do I know Kung Fu But I certainly know how Kung Fu

becomes possible Then again most of us can tie our shoelaces blindfold and at speed If we really watch the dexterity of someone tying a shoelace and detach from our habitual familiarity towards that calligraphic knotting procedure then we see that shoelace tying is Kung Fu To walk along a handrail by the side of a footpath is to disobey This is I feel passionately what poetry should be Poetry is just next to the conventional ways

Mark rail-balancing Thurmaston weir Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

King Learrsquos Lake Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

22

(or habits) of being human hellip but it disobeys which only goes to show those conventions more clearly even celebrate them hellip but certainly challenge them I was challenged by a very young man a very angry young man actually He was dressed in a dark uniform he was a park warden I was balancing along a rail that was placed in the landscape with the intention of

keeping pedestrians amp feeders of ducks amp such from falling into the lake It was never intended to be a way But this rail has been one of my ways for some years now As the water lapped to my right this young man barked his commands at me from my left Part of my discipline is to ignore anyone who talks to me whilst Irsquom balancing So that is what I did I regret that this only made the young man even more angry as he protested what he believed to be my irresponsibility However I would not change the way I behaved at that point What I would change is the way I tried to reason with him afterwards tried to get him to see that should I hurt myself well it would only by my fault and I would have to be responsible for it I think it is probably illegal for me to balance on this rail and so my argument only served to anger further this young man in his uniform I now feel that I shouldrsquove let the young man tell me off hellip and once hersquod gone just carried on along my way Itrsquos well over a year since this took place and Irsquove not seen the young uniformed man since The first time I balanced the thin white rail over the lock gate my fear was intense Although I knew falling into the lock was unlikely to do me much harm But the lock its narrow slot its dark obscure water ndash the lock holds a terror The terror in the bottom of the lock is still there Itrsquos a simple terror and a true one ndash it consists of no oxygen amp filthy cold wet depth No place to live in Over the years my balance has become so sharp that walking the thin white rail over the lock gate poised breathing above no place to live where the terror still is has become a joy I love poetry First published on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2016

Mark being challenged by a young official in Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

23

Balance Sings

my feet feel

the rollof a long beech branch

air by amp

below memy hands green with gravity

light is

passingthrough

my fingersI swaylike a treersquos

stillnessspeededI stand

on a longline of heldstar-parts

springy wood resounds with

24

the beautifully weak force

of Earthrsquos pull

only my feet touch

my framesways freearms divininga star-heartrsquos

vortex or

a deep poolof time drying

I sway

feet plantedto bark asroots topplethrough soilrsquos

unseen systems

I lift a planted foot ripmy positionand new

ly replacea new shape

25

a beech stays

grace-filled

my feet feelalong a longcurved beech

limb this swayas sweet

as saying

arememberednameneverknownbefore

Mark Goodwin

lsquoBalance Singsrsquo appears in Mark Goodwinrsquos collection Steps (Longbarrow Press 2014)

26

From Borderlands (2014) Karl Hurst

27

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom

Hardwick to Chatteris mdashAnd toward what dates do we write ourselves Paul Celan Meridian

The poem chooses December 5the day of fracturetime amp everythingis out of jointboundaries borders places dissolveinto an in-between-ness amp a nowhere

See Holbeinrsquos ldquoThe Ambassadorsrdquo Instead of viewing it straight on stand very close to it on the right hand side Only then does the oblong shape in the bottom centre reveal itself to be a human skull Anamorphosis

Today the path traces the journey in to landscapenot a noun but a verbnot an object to be examined ora text to be read buta process marking the trace of its passing

19

The trace defines withholds remains after the footsteps inscribing it have passed drawing you backwards into itself

I cannot walk this waywithout thinking of you

stand close to me now

Nancy Gaffield

lsquoHardwick to Chatterisrsquo appears in Nancy Gaffieldrsquos collection Meridian (Longbarrow Press 2019)

20

Along a Line Mark Goodwin

I have what could be described as a penchant for balancing along things ndash fence rails or tree branches or cables etc Such balancing is intensified walking I so enjoy the precision of toe ball-of-foot amp heel placed on solidity and feeling for friction as the rest of my body sways in air and pulls only against its own muscles to stay placed and connected by feet As a poet I have a penchant for lines for sound-shapes amp text-shapes measured out sometimes even in feet The metaphor of balancer precisely stepping along a rail equalling poet is no metaphor at all nor a symbol Humans walk and humans balance and humans speak Very near to where I live there is a country park It has an abundance of solid lines to balance along One of my favourite lines is made from

old railway track bolted to short pillars This single railway rail is just a foot or two above the water of the river Soar and it was placed here as a guard to keep boats off the weir Just the other day an elderly couple paused on the walkway running parallel with the rail they watched me intently as I walked backwards along the line When I got to one of the pillars I stood on its rectangular top and got chatting with the couple I mentioned to them how last summer an elderly woman probably in her mid-seventies had watched me just as intently as they and that when Irsquod finished my walk she came over to me smiling She was delighted and told me that she had last walked along that very rail when she was twelve years old When I first started balancing in the park I was a little shy or rather I didnrsquot want people to think I was showing off so I would try to wait until no one was about This was almost impossible and so I was hardly getting any balancing done And to grow the power of balance one has to do a lot of it So I decided that I must

Mark on the weir rail Birstall Leicestershire (photo by Elaine Miller)

21

balance whatever whoever was about and that part of the practice should be to ignore whoever was watching me or speaking to me whilst I was balancing but that once done with my balancing should someone ask me about it I should tell them as much as I could This practice has led me into delightful and sometimes inspiring encounters with various kinds of people from cheeky teenagers through to a serious

but gentle Indian doctor Most people have been inspired by my balancing and have inspired me by the ways they have questioned me

There have been a few incidents Once on the railway rail by the weir a lad threw a football at me It skimmed in front of my face I didnrsquot even flinch not one teeter My body was so focused on being in balance on the rail that it or was it me just accepted the flying object as being part of the place amp the moment I suppose sudden ducks amp low-flying geese had helped in my training In no way do I know Kung Fu But I certainly know how Kung Fu

becomes possible Then again most of us can tie our shoelaces blindfold and at speed If we really watch the dexterity of someone tying a shoelace and detach from our habitual familiarity towards that calligraphic knotting procedure then we see that shoelace tying is Kung Fu To walk along a handrail by the side of a footpath is to disobey This is I feel passionately what poetry should be Poetry is just next to the conventional ways

Mark rail-balancing Thurmaston weir Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

King Learrsquos Lake Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

22

(or habits) of being human hellip but it disobeys which only goes to show those conventions more clearly even celebrate them hellip but certainly challenge them I was challenged by a very young man a very angry young man actually He was dressed in a dark uniform he was a park warden I was balancing along a rail that was placed in the landscape with the intention of

keeping pedestrians amp feeders of ducks amp such from falling into the lake It was never intended to be a way But this rail has been one of my ways for some years now As the water lapped to my right this young man barked his commands at me from my left Part of my discipline is to ignore anyone who talks to me whilst Irsquom balancing So that is what I did I regret that this only made the young man even more angry as he protested what he believed to be my irresponsibility However I would not change the way I behaved at that point What I would change is the way I tried to reason with him afterwards tried to get him to see that should I hurt myself well it would only by my fault and I would have to be responsible for it I think it is probably illegal for me to balance on this rail and so my argument only served to anger further this young man in his uniform I now feel that I shouldrsquove let the young man tell me off hellip and once hersquod gone just carried on along my way Itrsquos well over a year since this took place and Irsquove not seen the young uniformed man since The first time I balanced the thin white rail over the lock gate my fear was intense Although I knew falling into the lock was unlikely to do me much harm But the lock its narrow slot its dark obscure water ndash the lock holds a terror The terror in the bottom of the lock is still there Itrsquos a simple terror and a true one ndash it consists of no oxygen amp filthy cold wet depth No place to live in Over the years my balance has become so sharp that walking the thin white rail over the lock gate poised breathing above no place to live where the terror still is has become a joy I love poetry First published on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2016

Mark being challenged by a young official in Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

23

Balance Sings

my feet feel

the rollof a long beech branch

air by amp

below memy hands green with gravity

light is

passingthrough

my fingersI swaylike a treersquos

stillnessspeededI stand

on a longline of heldstar-parts

springy wood resounds with

24

the beautifully weak force

of Earthrsquos pull

only my feet touch

my framesways freearms divininga star-heartrsquos

vortex or

a deep poolof time drying

I sway

feet plantedto bark asroots topplethrough soilrsquos

unseen systems

I lift a planted foot ripmy positionand new

ly replacea new shape

25

a beech stays

grace-filled

my feet feelalong a longcurved beech

limb this swayas sweet

as saying

arememberednameneverknownbefore

Mark Goodwin

lsquoBalance Singsrsquo appears in Mark Goodwinrsquos collection Steps (Longbarrow Press 2014)

26

From Borderlands (2014) Karl Hurst

27

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom

The trace defines withholds remains after the footsteps inscribing it have passed drawing you backwards into itself

I cannot walk this waywithout thinking of you

stand close to me now

Nancy Gaffield

lsquoHardwick to Chatterisrsquo appears in Nancy Gaffieldrsquos collection Meridian (Longbarrow Press 2019)

20

Along a Line Mark Goodwin

I have what could be described as a penchant for balancing along things ndash fence rails or tree branches or cables etc Such balancing is intensified walking I so enjoy the precision of toe ball-of-foot amp heel placed on solidity and feeling for friction as the rest of my body sways in air and pulls only against its own muscles to stay placed and connected by feet As a poet I have a penchant for lines for sound-shapes amp text-shapes measured out sometimes even in feet The metaphor of balancer precisely stepping along a rail equalling poet is no metaphor at all nor a symbol Humans walk and humans balance and humans speak Very near to where I live there is a country park It has an abundance of solid lines to balance along One of my favourite lines is made from

old railway track bolted to short pillars This single railway rail is just a foot or two above the water of the river Soar and it was placed here as a guard to keep boats off the weir Just the other day an elderly couple paused on the walkway running parallel with the rail they watched me intently as I walked backwards along the line When I got to one of the pillars I stood on its rectangular top and got chatting with the couple I mentioned to them how last summer an elderly woman probably in her mid-seventies had watched me just as intently as they and that when Irsquod finished my walk she came over to me smiling She was delighted and told me that she had last walked along that very rail when she was twelve years old When I first started balancing in the park I was a little shy or rather I didnrsquot want people to think I was showing off so I would try to wait until no one was about This was almost impossible and so I was hardly getting any balancing done And to grow the power of balance one has to do a lot of it So I decided that I must

Mark on the weir rail Birstall Leicestershire (photo by Elaine Miller)

21

balance whatever whoever was about and that part of the practice should be to ignore whoever was watching me or speaking to me whilst I was balancing but that once done with my balancing should someone ask me about it I should tell them as much as I could This practice has led me into delightful and sometimes inspiring encounters with various kinds of people from cheeky teenagers through to a serious

but gentle Indian doctor Most people have been inspired by my balancing and have inspired me by the ways they have questioned me

There have been a few incidents Once on the railway rail by the weir a lad threw a football at me It skimmed in front of my face I didnrsquot even flinch not one teeter My body was so focused on being in balance on the rail that it or was it me just accepted the flying object as being part of the place amp the moment I suppose sudden ducks amp low-flying geese had helped in my training In no way do I know Kung Fu But I certainly know how Kung Fu

becomes possible Then again most of us can tie our shoelaces blindfold and at speed If we really watch the dexterity of someone tying a shoelace and detach from our habitual familiarity towards that calligraphic knotting procedure then we see that shoelace tying is Kung Fu To walk along a handrail by the side of a footpath is to disobey This is I feel passionately what poetry should be Poetry is just next to the conventional ways

Mark rail-balancing Thurmaston weir Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

King Learrsquos Lake Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

22

(or habits) of being human hellip but it disobeys which only goes to show those conventions more clearly even celebrate them hellip but certainly challenge them I was challenged by a very young man a very angry young man actually He was dressed in a dark uniform he was a park warden I was balancing along a rail that was placed in the landscape with the intention of

keeping pedestrians amp feeders of ducks amp such from falling into the lake It was never intended to be a way But this rail has been one of my ways for some years now As the water lapped to my right this young man barked his commands at me from my left Part of my discipline is to ignore anyone who talks to me whilst Irsquom balancing So that is what I did I regret that this only made the young man even more angry as he protested what he believed to be my irresponsibility However I would not change the way I behaved at that point What I would change is the way I tried to reason with him afterwards tried to get him to see that should I hurt myself well it would only by my fault and I would have to be responsible for it I think it is probably illegal for me to balance on this rail and so my argument only served to anger further this young man in his uniform I now feel that I shouldrsquove let the young man tell me off hellip and once hersquod gone just carried on along my way Itrsquos well over a year since this took place and Irsquove not seen the young uniformed man since The first time I balanced the thin white rail over the lock gate my fear was intense Although I knew falling into the lock was unlikely to do me much harm But the lock its narrow slot its dark obscure water ndash the lock holds a terror The terror in the bottom of the lock is still there Itrsquos a simple terror and a true one ndash it consists of no oxygen amp filthy cold wet depth No place to live in Over the years my balance has become so sharp that walking the thin white rail over the lock gate poised breathing above no place to live where the terror still is has become a joy I love poetry First published on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2016

Mark being challenged by a young official in Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

23

Balance Sings

my feet feel

the rollof a long beech branch

air by amp

below memy hands green with gravity

light is

passingthrough

my fingersI swaylike a treersquos

stillnessspeededI stand

on a longline of heldstar-parts

springy wood resounds with

24

the beautifully weak force

of Earthrsquos pull

only my feet touch

my framesways freearms divininga star-heartrsquos

vortex or

a deep poolof time drying

I sway

feet plantedto bark asroots topplethrough soilrsquos

unseen systems

I lift a planted foot ripmy positionand new

ly replacea new shape

25

a beech stays

grace-filled

my feet feelalong a longcurved beech

limb this swayas sweet

as saying

arememberednameneverknownbefore

Mark Goodwin

lsquoBalance Singsrsquo appears in Mark Goodwinrsquos collection Steps (Longbarrow Press 2014)

26

From Borderlands (2014) Karl Hurst

27

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom

Along a Line Mark Goodwin

I have what could be described as a penchant for balancing along things ndash fence rails or tree branches or cables etc Such balancing is intensified walking I so enjoy the precision of toe ball-of-foot amp heel placed on solidity and feeling for friction as the rest of my body sways in air and pulls only against its own muscles to stay placed and connected by feet As a poet I have a penchant for lines for sound-shapes amp text-shapes measured out sometimes even in feet The metaphor of balancer precisely stepping along a rail equalling poet is no metaphor at all nor a symbol Humans walk and humans balance and humans speak Very near to where I live there is a country park It has an abundance of solid lines to balance along One of my favourite lines is made from

old railway track bolted to short pillars This single railway rail is just a foot or two above the water of the river Soar and it was placed here as a guard to keep boats off the weir Just the other day an elderly couple paused on the walkway running parallel with the rail they watched me intently as I walked backwards along the line When I got to one of the pillars I stood on its rectangular top and got chatting with the couple I mentioned to them how last summer an elderly woman probably in her mid-seventies had watched me just as intently as they and that when Irsquod finished my walk she came over to me smiling She was delighted and told me that she had last walked along that very rail when she was twelve years old When I first started balancing in the park I was a little shy or rather I didnrsquot want people to think I was showing off so I would try to wait until no one was about This was almost impossible and so I was hardly getting any balancing done And to grow the power of balance one has to do a lot of it So I decided that I must

Mark on the weir rail Birstall Leicestershire (photo by Elaine Miller)

21

balance whatever whoever was about and that part of the practice should be to ignore whoever was watching me or speaking to me whilst I was balancing but that once done with my balancing should someone ask me about it I should tell them as much as I could This practice has led me into delightful and sometimes inspiring encounters with various kinds of people from cheeky teenagers through to a serious

but gentle Indian doctor Most people have been inspired by my balancing and have inspired me by the ways they have questioned me

There have been a few incidents Once on the railway rail by the weir a lad threw a football at me It skimmed in front of my face I didnrsquot even flinch not one teeter My body was so focused on being in balance on the rail that it or was it me just accepted the flying object as being part of the place amp the moment I suppose sudden ducks amp low-flying geese had helped in my training In no way do I know Kung Fu But I certainly know how Kung Fu

becomes possible Then again most of us can tie our shoelaces blindfold and at speed If we really watch the dexterity of someone tying a shoelace and detach from our habitual familiarity towards that calligraphic knotting procedure then we see that shoelace tying is Kung Fu To walk along a handrail by the side of a footpath is to disobey This is I feel passionately what poetry should be Poetry is just next to the conventional ways

Mark rail-balancing Thurmaston weir Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

King Learrsquos Lake Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

22

(or habits) of being human hellip but it disobeys which only goes to show those conventions more clearly even celebrate them hellip but certainly challenge them I was challenged by a very young man a very angry young man actually He was dressed in a dark uniform he was a park warden I was balancing along a rail that was placed in the landscape with the intention of

keeping pedestrians amp feeders of ducks amp such from falling into the lake It was never intended to be a way But this rail has been one of my ways for some years now As the water lapped to my right this young man barked his commands at me from my left Part of my discipline is to ignore anyone who talks to me whilst Irsquom balancing So that is what I did I regret that this only made the young man even more angry as he protested what he believed to be my irresponsibility However I would not change the way I behaved at that point What I would change is the way I tried to reason with him afterwards tried to get him to see that should I hurt myself well it would only by my fault and I would have to be responsible for it I think it is probably illegal for me to balance on this rail and so my argument only served to anger further this young man in his uniform I now feel that I shouldrsquove let the young man tell me off hellip and once hersquod gone just carried on along my way Itrsquos well over a year since this took place and Irsquove not seen the young uniformed man since The first time I balanced the thin white rail over the lock gate my fear was intense Although I knew falling into the lock was unlikely to do me much harm But the lock its narrow slot its dark obscure water ndash the lock holds a terror The terror in the bottom of the lock is still there Itrsquos a simple terror and a true one ndash it consists of no oxygen amp filthy cold wet depth No place to live in Over the years my balance has become so sharp that walking the thin white rail over the lock gate poised breathing above no place to live where the terror still is has become a joy I love poetry First published on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2016

Mark being challenged by a young official in Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

23

Balance Sings

my feet feel

the rollof a long beech branch

air by amp

below memy hands green with gravity

light is

passingthrough

my fingersI swaylike a treersquos

stillnessspeededI stand

on a longline of heldstar-parts

springy wood resounds with

24

the beautifully weak force

of Earthrsquos pull

only my feet touch

my framesways freearms divininga star-heartrsquos

vortex or

a deep poolof time drying

I sway

feet plantedto bark asroots topplethrough soilrsquos

unseen systems

I lift a planted foot ripmy positionand new

ly replacea new shape

25

a beech stays

grace-filled

my feet feelalong a longcurved beech

limb this swayas sweet

as saying

arememberednameneverknownbefore

Mark Goodwin

lsquoBalance Singsrsquo appears in Mark Goodwinrsquos collection Steps (Longbarrow Press 2014)

26

From Borderlands (2014) Karl Hurst

27

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom

balance whatever whoever was about and that part of the practice should be to ignore whoever was watching me or speaking to me whilst I was balancing but that once done with my balancing should someone ask me about it I should tell them as much as I could This practice has led me into delightful and sometimes inspiring encounters with various kinds of people from cheeky teenagers through to a serious

but gentle Indian doctor Most people have been inspired by my balancing and have inspired me by the ways they have questioned me

There have been a few incidents Once on the railway rail by the weir a lad threw a football at me It skimmed in front of my face I didnrsquot even flinch not one teeter My body was so focused on being in balance on the rail that it or was it me just accepted the flying object as being part of the place amp the moment I suppose sudden ducks amp low-flying geese had helped in my training In no way do I know Kung Fu But I certainly know how Kung Fu

becomes possible Then again most of us can tie our shoelaces blindfold and at speed If we really watch the dexterity of someone tying a shoelace and detach from our habitual familiarity towards that calligraphic knotting procedure then we see that shoelace tying is Kung Fu To walk along a handrail by the side of a footpath is to disobey This is I feel passionately what poetry should be Poetry is just next to the conventional ways

Mark rail-balancing Thurmaston weir Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

King Learrsquos Lake Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

22

(or habits) of being human hellip but it disobeys which only goes to show those conventions more clearly even celebrate them hellip but certainly challenge them I was challenged by a very young man a very angry young man actually He was dressed in a dark uniform he was a park warden I was balancing along a rail that was placed in the landscape with the intention of

keeping pedestrians amp feeders of ducks amp such from falling into the lake It was never intended to be a way But this rail has been one of my ways for some years now As the water lapped to my right this young man barked his commands at me from my left Part of my discipline is to ignore anyone who talks to me whilst Irsquom balancing So that is what I did I regret that this only made the young man even more angry as he protested what he believed to be my irresponsibility However I would not change the way I behaved at that point What I would change is the way I tried to reason with him afterwards tried to get him to see that should I hurt myself well it would only by my fault and I would have to be responsible for it I think it is probably illegal for me to balance on this rail and so my argument only served to anger further this young man in his uniform I now feel that I shouldrsquove let the young man tell me off hellip and once hersquod gone just carried on along my way Itrsquos well over a year since this took place and Irsquove not seen the young uniformed man since The first time I balanced the thin white rail over the lock gate my fear was intense Although I knew falling into the lock was unlikely to do me much harm But the lock its narrow slot its dark obscure water ndash the lock holds a terror The terror in the bottom of the lock is still there Itrsquos a simple terror and a true one ndash it consists of no oxygen amp filthy cold wet depth No place to live in Over the years my balance has become so sharp that walking the thin white rail over the lock gate poised breathing above no place to live where the terror still is has become a joy I love poetry First published on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2016

Mark being challenged by a young official in Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

23

Balance Sings

my feet feel

the rollof a long beech branch

air by amp

below memy hands green with gravity

light is

passingthrough

my fingersI swaylike a treersquos

stillnessspeededI stand

on a longline of heldstar-parts

springy wood resounds with

24

the beautifully weak force

of Earthrsquos pull

only my feet touch

my framesways freearms divininga star-heartrsquos

vortex or

a deep poolof time drying

I sway

feet plantedto bark asroots topplethrough soilrsquos

unseen systems

I lift a planted foot ripmy positionand new

ly replacea new shape

25

a beech stays

grace-filled

my feet feelalong a longcurved beech

limb this swayas sweet

as saying

arememberednameneverknownbefore

Mark Goodwin

lsquoBalance Singsrsquo appears in Mark Goodwinrsquos collection Steps (Longbarrow Press 2014)

26

From Borderlands (2014) Karl Hurst

27

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom

(or habits) of being human hellip but it disobeys which only goes to show those conventions more clearly even celebrate them hellip but certainly challenge them I was challenged by a very young man a very angry young man actually He was dressed in a dark uniform he was a park warden I was balancing along a rail that was placed in the landscape with the intention of

keeping pedestrians amp feeders of ducks amp such from falling into the lake It was never intended to be a way But this rail has been one of my ways for some years now As the water lapped to my right this young man barked his commands at me from my left Part of my discipline is to ignore anyone who talks to me whilst Irsquom balancing So that is what I did I regret that this only made the young man even more angry as he protested what he believed to be my irresponsibility However I would not change the way I behaved at that point What I would change is the way I tried to reason with him afterwards tried to get him to see that should I hurt myself well it would only by my fault and I would have to be responsible for it I think it is probably illegal for me to balance on this rail and so my argument only served to anger further this young man in his uniform I now feel that I shouldrsquove let the young man tell me off hellip and once hersquod gone just carried on along my way Itrsquos well over a year since this took place and Irsquove not seen the young uniformed man since The first time I balanced the thin white rail over the lock gate my fear was intense Although I knew falling into the lock was unlikely to do me much harm But the lock its narrow slot its dark obscure water ndash the lock holds a terror The terror in the bottom of the lock is still there Itrsquos a simple terror and a true one ndash it consists of no oxygen amp filthy cold wet depth No place to live in Over the years my balance has become so sharp that walking the thin white rail over the lock gate poised breathing above no place to live where the terror still is has become a joy I love poetry First published on the Longbarrow Blog 31 August 2016

Mark being challenged by a young official in Watermead Park Leicestershire (photo by Nikki Clayton)

23

Balance Sings

my feet feel

the rollof a long beech branch

air by amp

below memy hands green with gravity

light is

passingthrough

my fingersI swaylike a treersquos

stillnessspeededI stand

on a longline of heldstar-parts

springy wood resounds with

24

the beautifully weak force

of Earthrsquos pull

only my feet touch

my framesways freearms divininga star-heartrsquos

vortex or

a deep poolof time drying

I sway

feet plantedto bark asroots topplethrough soilrsquos

unseen systems

I lift a planted foot ripmy positionand new

ly replacea new shape

25

a beech stays

grace-filled

my feet feelalong a longcurved beech

limb this swayas sweet

as saying

arememberednameneverknownbefore

Mark Goodwin

lsquoBalance Singsrsquo appears in Mark Goodwinrsquos collection Steps (Longbarrow Press 2014)

26

From Borderlands (2014) Karl Hurst

27

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom

Balance Sings

my feet feel

the rollof a long beech branch

air by amp

below memy hands green with gravity

light is

passingthrough

my fingersI swaylike a treersquos

stillnessspeededI stand

on a longline of heldstar-parts

springy wood resounds with

24

the beautifully weak force

of Earthrsquos pull

only my feet touch

my framesways freearms divininga star-heartrsquos

vortex or

a deep poolof time drying

I sway

feet plantedto bark asroots topplethrough soilrsquos

unseen systems

I lift a planted foot ripmy positionand new

ly replacea new shape

25

a beech stays

grace-filled

my feet feelalong a longcurved beech

limb this swayas sweet

as saying

arememberednameneverknownbefore

Mark Goodwin

lsquoBalance Singsrsquo appears in Mark Goodwinrsquos collection Steps (Longbarrow Press 2014)

26

From Borderlands (2014) Karl Hurst

27

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom

the beautifully weak force

of Earthrsquos pull

only my feet touch

my framesways freearms divininga star-heartrsquos

vortex or

a deep poolof time drying

I sway

feet plantedto bark asroots topplethrough soilrsquos

unseen systems

I lift a planted foot ripmy positionand new

ly replacea new shape

25

a beech stays

grace-filled

my feet feelalong a longcurved beech

limb this swayas sweet

as saying

arememberednameneverknownbefore

Mark Goodwin

lsquoBalance Singsrsquo appears in Mark Goodwinrsquos collection Steps (Longbarrow Press 2014)

26

From Borderlands (2014) Karl Hurst

27

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom

a beech stays

grace-filled

my feet feelalong a longcurved beech

limb this swayas sweet

as saying

arememberednameneverknownbefore

Mark Goodwin

lsquoBalance Singsrsquo appears in Mark Goodwinrsquos collection Steps (Longbarrow Press 2014)

26

From Borderlands (2014) Karl Hurst

27

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom

From Borderlands (2014) Karl Hurst

27

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom

Further Reading

In print

Meridian (2019)Nancy Gaffield

Rock as Gloss (2019) Steps (2014)Mark Goodwin

The Grail Roads (2018) The Purging of Spence Broughton a Highwayman (2009)Rob Hindle

Skin (2015)Chris Jones

The Footing (2013) Angelina Ayers James Caruth Mark Goodwin Rob Hindle Andrew Hirst Chris Jones Fay Musselwhite

Online (click titles for links)

Meridian The Last Step on embodied research the poetic journal and the walking and writing of MeridianNancy Gaffield

The Flattening amp Covering Wave on memory and displacement in south LeicestershireMark Goodwin

Under the Water on re-walking the townscapes of Flights and TraversesRob Hindle

Drawing on Walls the Making of lsquoDeath and the Gallantrsquo on pre-Reformation wall art and its attempted obliterationChris Jones

Cover photography Karl Hurst wwwlongbarrowpresscom